\u2018They\u2019re social, playful and just a very intelligent bird\u2019\u2026 Margaret Atwood on ravens. Photograph: Leyland Cecco\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
If she could be any bird, Margaret Atwood<\/a> would transform into a raven. \u201cThey\u2019re very smart. They\u2019re social, playful and just a very successful bird,\u201d she says while seated in a corner of a bird observatory in the Lake Erie Islands archipelago. \u201cThey\u2019re quite an intelligent problem solver.\u201d<\/p>\n Pelee Island sits at the nexus of two important migration routes, making it a destination for birds travelling thousands of kilometres each year. Photograph: Leyland Cecco\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The observatory, which she set up with her late partner, Graeme Gibson, is located on the west shore of Pelee Island \u2013 the southernmost community in Canada<\/a> \u2013 and is so new that there are no lightbulbs in a handful of lamps.<\/p>\n Pelee sits at the nexus of two important migration routes, making it a destination for birds travelling thousands of kilometres each year. Ravens are not among its regular visitors \u2013 only one was spotted in recent memory, in 2023 \u2013 but Atwood likes the old Inuit joke about them.<\/p>\n A hunter arrives at a place he has never camped before, and asks a raven where to spend the night. \u201cThe raven says, \u2018The base of that hill is a good place,\u2019 and so he sets up his little tent there,\u201d says Atwood.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the middle of the night, a boulder rolls down the hill and crushes him. And the raven, as he\u2019s enjoying the feast, says, \u2018Works every time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The bestselling author has blended the lines that separate humans and birds in her work. Photograph: Leyland Cecco\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The bestselling Canadian author, whose prophetic works of speculative fiction have won countless awards, has blurred the lines that separate humans and birds both in her work<\/a> and, at times, in her life.<\/p>\n She and Gibson, also a novelist, once dressed up for a party as Odin\u2019s ravens, Thought and Memory. They wore black gloves and fashioned beaks from black construction paper.<\/p>\n Gibson died in 2019. In his final years, vascular dementia overtook his ability to journal about the birds. Still, he would watch them daily.<\/p>\n Pelee Island is accessible only by boat and plane and sits 20 miles off the Ontario mainland in Lake Erie. Photograph: Leyland Cecco\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cOur back yard feeder and our birdbath were attracting only sparrows and robins and grackles and the occasional pigeon, but he didn\u2019t care: every bird was worthy of attention,\u201d Atwood wrote in a foreword to Gibson\u2019s book, The Bedside Book of Birds<\/a>. \u201c\u2018I no longer know their names,\u2019 he told a friend of ours. \u2018But then, they don\u2019t know my name either.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Now, Gibson\u2019s legacy is about to help expand humanity\u2019s understanding of birds. On Friday Western University, in London, Ontario, announced that Atwood had donated C$1m (\u00a3540,000) to celebrate her late partner\u2019s love of birds.<\/p>\n The gift will create the Graeme Gibson chair in avian biology, with the goal of better understanding the fundamental processes that shape how birds move, adapt and behave in an environment undergoing profound transformation.<\/p>\n Atwood has championed many causes, including Indigenous education and human rights, but environmental protection is at the forefront of them.<\/p>\n \u201cI have what they call a platform,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I also had what they call extra money.\u201d<\/p>\n Pelee Island has intact Carolinian forests. Photograph: Leyland Cecco\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Behind the deadpan is a longstanding belief in the power of science to answer deceptively simple questions about the natural world. How do birds navigate thousands of kilometres? How do they sense magnetic fields? How do they know where to go?<\/p>\n \u201cLook at navigation,\u201d says Chris Guglielmo, the co-director of the advanced facility for avian research at Western University, which received Atwood\u2019s gift.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a lot of descriptive understanding of what happens when we manipulate the magnetic fields, for example, the bird changes its orientation. We know they have these senses. But how they actually work is still a big mystery, and very exciting for people to try to study.\u201d<\/p>\n The university has emerged as a global leader in avian research, developing the world\u2019s first hypobaric climatic wind tunnel for bird flight in order to better study how they move through different types of air.<\/p>\n Guglielmo and his team have also made significant contributions to understanding how migratory birds fuel themselves, travel and survive long-distance journeys. But even the leading minds remain stumped by many of the mysteries that still surround the lives \u2013 and minds \u2013 of birds.<\/p>\n Vincent Moreau, a researcher with the Pelee Island Bird Observatory, helps \u2018band\u2019 birds that are caught each morning in fine mesh nets. Staff log details about the bird to help study their migratory patterns. Photograph: Leyland Cecco\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cOur new graduate students sometimes struggle to come up with a scientific question,\u201d Guglielmo says. \u201cAnd we tell them, there\u2019s a million questions we don\u2019t know the answer to. I have a whiteboard covered with potential questions. I just don\u2019t have enough funding, people and time to even begin answering them.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s why when he received the call about the gift, he was told to sit down first.<\/p>\n \u201cIt made me feel so good that we\u2019re not only reaching and having impact in the scientific community, but that more broadly in the public sphere,\u201d he says, adding that the gift was a \u201cvalidation\u201d of work done by the university\u2019s scientists.<\/p>\n Pelee Island is an important migration stopover for more than 200 species of birds. Photograph: Leyland Cecco\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Weeks before the gift was announced, Atwood celebrated the opening of the Atwood-Gibson Bird Centre on Pelee Island. Resembling a towel hung loosely from a clothesline, Pelee Island is a rare enclave that blends Carolinian forest, dunes and marshes. Sitting at the intersection of the Atlantic and Mississippi migration routes, each spring it welcomes more than 200 species, not to mention thousands of serious birders.<\/p>\n At the event, she was simultaneously treated as literary royalty \u2013 attenders queued nervously for a chance to speak to her and pose for photographs \u2013 and as Peggy, the no-nonsense islander who often spends months at her cottage there and is woven into the community of 235 full-time residents.<\/p>\n The new building expands the footprint of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory, which the couple co-founded more than two decades ago to study the transcontinental movement of birds. It is also a refuge from Atwood\u2019s nemesis: chiggers.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t know about chiggers?\u201d she says of the six-legged larval mites hiding in the grass around the building. \u201cOnce you learn about their bite \u2013 and the itching that never stops \u2013 you never forget.\u201d<\/p>\n While Atwood was exposed to birds \u2013 and chiggers \u2013 during a youth spent in the Ontario hinterlands with her forest entomologist father, Gibson became a bird lover later in life, with the zeal of a born-again religious convert.<\/p>\n \u201cAt its heightened moments, birdwatching can encourage a state of being close to rapture,\u201d he wrote in his book. \u201cIt is an ecstasy that is said to accompany the writing of poetry; sometimes it comes when we\u2019re listening to music.\u201d<\/p>\n The red-tailed hawk, the bird that sparked Graeme Gibson\u2019s love of birdwatching. Photograph: Anadolu\/Getty Images<\/p>\n His \u201cspark bird\u201d \u2013 the name birders give to the particular species that triggers a lifelong love of the pursuit \u2013 was the red-tailed hawk, which is spotted frequently on the island.<\/p>\n Others, including the blackpoll warbler, are declining rapidly. The warbler breeds in the northern boreal forest, as far north as the Arctic, before embarking on a nonstop journey of almost 1,800 miles over open water to South America. Its population has dropped more than 80% in the last five decades, making it the fastest declining songbird.<\/p>\n Canada and the US have lost nearly 3bn birds since 1970. While certain species, including ducks and birds of prey, have surged in number, birds that travel thousands of miles each year have dropped in population by nearly 30%.<\/p>\n The declines, expected to increase further with the climate emergency, matter profoundly for a place such as Canada, where many bird species are migratory.<\/p>\n Atwood says the four biggest threats to birds \u2013 windows, cats, toxic pollution and environmental destruction of their habitats \u2013 are all things humans can help stop.<\/p>\n The first two are easier to address, but the latter are more challenging.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople think: we can cut down this forest, and we\u2019ll just make another forest over there. It\u2019s not going to be the same. Birds have specific habitats that they need, so it\u2019s not like spreading butter on a piece of toast.\u201d<\/p>\n Atwood, who has spent much of her career imagining dystopian futures, is nonetheless optimistic about a future that has not yet been decided.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s say hope is a built-in human characteristic. Unless you\u2019re deeply depressed, you wake up every morning thinking, what will this day bring? Maybe it will be a chocolate bar. Maybe there\u2019ll be some surprises. If our ancestors didn\u2019t have that, we probably wouldn\u2019t be here,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Margaret Atwood with Graeme Gibson at a cocktail party at the Book Lovers Ball at the Royal York hotel in Toronto. Photograph: Steve Russell\/Toronto Star\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cAll of us trust this possibility that the doors are not locked. Yes, you may open door A and fall down a flight of stairs, but you may open door B and there will be a chocolate bar.\u201d<\/p>\n She points to how young people, especially children, appear hardwired to engage deeply with nature.<\/p>\n \u201cThe passion is built in. They\u2019re very interested in anything that moves, anything outside, and unless some grown-up teaches them to be afraid of such things, that interest will continue,\u201d she says. \u201cWe are part of the natural world. It\u2019s your choice of how to be in it.\u201d<\/p>\n More than 11 years ago, Atwood and others signed a letter of outrage<\/a> after the Oxford Junior Dictionary dropped a number of nature-themed words \u2013 including raven \u2013 in favour of a technology-heavy vernacular.<\/p>\n